It was a social expectation rather than a technology thing. Sure, you could leave a conversation and restart it later. But that was similar to physically walking away from someone. Unless you're finished or really have to do something else, you usually don't walk away.

It's still strange when you write to somebody and you see the person is online, but doesn't reply.

I guess turning off online status completely is the way to go. Maybe it should be off by default. What's the point of showing it if the person can answer anyway when he has the time?

The difference before is that people didn't have 24x7 connections, so if they were online it meant they were dialed up and sitting at their computer. Now 'online' means nothing as we're all always online.

I had asynchronous chat conversations on AIM/Yahoo/MSN/GChat/etc. with dozens of people for over a decade; it was normal and expected for conversations to be as synchronous or asynchronous as either participant wanted.

Just to add another anecdote; I had the same experience as viraptor. It was expected that you said bye if you were leaving, and the ghosting equivalent was to be online but not reply to a message. I knew a few people that used it async but most were not like that.

A few people actually took it very personally when the common behaviour started to change. At some point an "internet etiquette" document started making rounds with "if I'm online it doesn't guarantee I'll respond immediately".

That was around the good old times when we argued whether utf-8 posts are acceptable, whether top-posters deserve life sentences, and other very important things...

Same experience here. Among my MSN friends it was also common to say "brb" to pause the conversation for a short amount of time. In contrast, I've never seen that in WhatsApp conversations.

Ah, yup! I had forgotten about that. Brb and afk. It did really feel like you were being ignored if the person wasn't responding. Also, having to let people know if you were going to be gone for an extended period of time, like a week or more. Summer camp! That was the worst. This girl I was online-dating went to camp for a few months and came back with a new boyfriend, lol.

My memory is fuzzy but I don't recall any central server saving the messages- nothing could be sent to you if you were not online. Which, considering dialup hogged the phone line, was most of the day.

Coming from IRC and ICQ and AIM and all that, most of my conversations were asynchronous in one sense.

But in another sense, they weren't, as I would often elect to set my status across my services as Away in order to curb the expectations of some people who were particularly in need of attention.

I guess that part hasn't changed, though. Just today I had to explicitly set boundaries with someone about how often they can realistically expect to command my attention away from my task at hand and toward my phone.

> Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation?

Sort of, but back then the expectations were different. It would have been uncommon, and sometimes impolite, to come back to a conversation several hours or minutes later as if there was no official end.

Feels weird now but having lived in the original chat room era, in which our parents' phone calls interrupted our internet connection, it was pretty different back then.